Storage solutions firm Hitachi Data Systems has announced the availability in Malaysia of its Unified Compute Platform (UCP), which will offer best-of-breed solutions with an open architecture approach, it said.

Speaking during the Hitachi Information Forum in Malaysia on 25 October 2012, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) senior vice president & general manager, Asia Pacific, Kevin Eggleston said HDS UCP is designed to help companies face the complex challenge of managing the dramatic increase in data, as well the use of mobile devices. "The strategy behind UCP is to help CIOs meet the business demands of increasing the efficient use of resources, while better managing investments, operating expenses and people."

"UCP is built on a strategy of building blocks across the different layers of cloud infrastructure: the first is infrastructure cloud on demand, the content cloud, and then the information cloud, which needs to provide big data capability on demand," said Eggleston. "Real time analytics will help to deliver the increased efficiency and utilisation of resources to meet the required business levels."

He said that all Hitachi UCP converged infrastructure solutions are thoroughly new designs to solve the reliability, availability, scalability and performance challenges that IT organisations face when using many first-generation converged infrastructure stacks.

"With the range of new UCP solutions, Hitachi Data Systems is specifically addressing the most pressing needs of CIOs when considering a converged infrastructure," Eggleston said. "These needs include accelerating business velocity, increasing staff productivity, improving IT economics for pre- and post-deployment, and meeting stringent service level agreements."

He said that the new Hitachi UCP family of solutions provided a comprehensive, pre-tested cloud-ready infrastructure that can be deployed quickly and managed easily, unlike custom approaches that require exhaustive testing and integration costs. Eleven new Hitachi UCP offerings give customers superior flexibility and choices, based on two converged infrastructure models.

Several strategic partners, including technology partners Brocade and Intel, and Hitachi TrueNorth Partners including Arrow, Avnet and ViON have endorsed Hitachi UCP solutions, said Eggleston, who added HDS is open to talking with other appropriate IT providers.

One management software to rule them all

HDS director, platforms and solutions business, Asia Pacific, Saravanan Krishan said the first flavour of UCP is Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Pro, which is pre-configured, tightly integrated turnkey solutions built with world-class Hitachi Data Systems servers and storage, and industry-standard networking. "The initial offering in this family of solutions is UCP Pro for VMware vSphere, which features innovative Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director software that provides VMware vCenter Server integrated management and orchestration. This is the set menu, as it were.

"The a la carte offering is the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select is a series of pre-validated reference solutions that can be configured using a selection of industry-leading Hitachi storage, server and software management, for a wide range of top-tier applications," said Krishan. "Hitachi UCP Select also offers converged solutions with Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) servers. Hitachi UCP Select is ideal for organisations that require a flexible converged infrastructure."

"Converged infrastructure solutions have been available in the market for some time, but when enterprise organisations and cloud service providers encounter the requirements of true

mission-critical workloads, these first-generation converged offerings fall short of customer needs," he said. "Until today, organisations looking for a converged infrastructure solution had to choose from commodity systems that lack high reliability and availability, and have limited scalability and performance. Or they have had to choose integrated stacks with no truly unified infrastructure management."

He said that UCP Director software has the unique capability of giving administrators detailed views, management and orchestration of the underlying physical infrastructure in addition to virtual servers. "UCP Director enables administrators to use the same familiar VMware vCenter Server graphical user interface for orchestrating servers, networking and storage, and eliminates error prone, time-consuming manual tasks."

"The battleground over integrated compute and storage stacks is heating up with HDS coming out strong with its new converged infrastructure portfolio," said IDC research director, storage systems, Ashish Nadkarni. "This market has been served by either solution providers including all components from the same vendor or by pre-configured and pre-tested packages comprised of best-of-breed components from different vendors woven together by a mandatory management framework."

"HDS is breaking this 'either/or' mold by combining the best of each approach," said Nadkarni. "Hitachi UCP lets customers choose from a fully integrated stack of Hitachi servers and storage complete with orchestration software; or, from a portfolio of reference solutions featuring HDS storage that use either Hitachi or third-party servers. And by including Cisco UCS in its solutions, HDS provides its customers greater flexibility in mixing and matching these elements - all while maintaining the reliability and performance that has earned HDS the reputation of being bulletproof in the minds of many CIOs."